Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to reach both potential and existing customers, although its effectiveness divides opinions. Many have their inboxes filled with marketing messages that don't match their interests.
So, how can you create newsletters that serve your organization's target groups and are profitable from a business perspective? To answer this, we've compiled a bunch of email marketing tips that you can follow to create high-quality newsletters that meet the expectations of both your subscribers and your organization.
11 tips for effective email marketing:
- Build a quality email list
- Use attention-grabbing headlines
- Offer value
- Utilize personalization
- Optimize for mobile devices
- Add a clear CTA
- Time optimize
- Test
- Automate
- Utilize artificial intelligence
- Track and analyze results
Let’s explore the email marketing tips further!
1. Build a quality email list
Successful email marketing starts with a subscriber register that is continuously accumulated and maintained. The first tip for building a subscriber register in email marketing is to keep both legality and ethics in mind. In practice, this means favoring lists of voluntary subscribers instead of purchased lists. This ensures that you have a list of people who are genuinely interested in your company's products or services.
So, how do you maintain your subscriber register? Simply go through your email lists. Combine those interested in certain products or services into separate lists, and say goodbye to subscribers who, for example, haven't opened your emails in the past six months.
You can improve the quality of your list, for example, by:
- Asking what kind of content the recipient is interested in when they subscribe to your newsletter. This allows you to create different lists according to the recipient's interests right at the newsletter subscription stage.
- Utilizing double opt-in messages to confirm the newsletter subscription. This avoids subscribers who are not actually interested in your emails.
2. Use attention-grabbing headlines
The first challenge in newsletter communication is getting the recipient to open the message they receive. The simplest tip for email marketing is very compact: focus on the headline. The headline is the first thing the recipient sees and is the gatekeeper for whether or not they open the message. The headline should be attractive, concise, and clearly describe the topic.
When creating headlines, it is also important to remember the significance of the preheader. While the headline's task is to grab attention, the preheader's task is to maintain it and provide additional reasons why your email is worth opening. You can keep the headline concise, but the preheader must offer the recipient something more.
3. Offer value
Once you've grabbed attention with the headline and preheader and the recipient has opened the email, it's time to focus on the email's content. You can keep your newsletter subscribers satisfied by offering them content that provides real value, such as informative guides, up-to-date tips, or exclusive offers. Keep in mind that your recipients should always feel like they're getting something out of your emails since unsubscribing from the list is just a button away.
If finding value-producing content seems challenging, a simple but effective email marketing tip is to ask the customers themselves what kind of content they want. This can be easily done by adding surveys to your emails.
4. Utilize personalization
If you're still wondering how else you could offer value to your newsletter subscribers, incorporate personalization into your email marketing. This allows you to create newsletter content that meets the needs and interests of your email recipients. Your subscribers will be more engaged with your emails if they feel like they're receiving newsletters that truly meet their expectations.
If the previous point doesn't convince you yet, studies show that 77% of consumers are willing to share their email address to get a personalized shopping experience and additional benefits. In turn, 71% of consumers expect personalized content from companies.
Personalized newsletter content is not just something that sounds effective on a conceptual level, but something that consumers truly desire and expect from companies.
Utilize personalization, for example, by:
- Using the recipient's name in the email headline and content
- Sending messages according to the stage of the buying journey
- Remembering the newsletter subscriber on their birthday or anniversary of their customer relationship
- Utilizing purchase history and offering product recommendations
- Providing tips for efficient use of already purchased products
An additional tip for utilizing personalization in email marketing is to customize the email content according to the recipient. Some newsletter tools offer the possibility of personalizing different content sections based on set conditions. In this case, recipients who meet certain conditions will see different content in the same newsletter section. Convenient, isn't it?
5. Optimize for mobile devices
Do you often use your email on your phone? Probably, as an estimated 71 percent of people check their email on a mobile device. Therefore, your emails should look the same to all recipients regardless of the device. Make sure your emails work flawlessly on different devices
A high-quality newsletter tool and professional newsletter design guarantee that your emails look impeccable both on mobile and in the browser. However, it is essential to regularly check that the emails work on all devices. Test the reliability of your email by first sending it to yourself and checking it on your mobile device.
6. Add a clear CTA (Call to Action)
Support your email's goal by adding a CTA (call to action) button, which will guide your readers towards the desired outcome.
So, how do you ensure that the CTA button supports your goals? It may sound simple, but the CTA button should stand out from the background and contain a clear call to action. Believe it or not, many email marketers forget to follow this – just take a look at the newsletters that have arrived in your own inbox.
Following these instructions doesn't mean that the buttons have to be boring – on the contrary.
7. Time optimize
Even if you send the best emails in your industry, they won’t be opened if they are sent in the middle of the night. Research when your email recipients are most actively reading their emails and schedule your sends for these times. Start by testing different times and tracking the analytics in your newsletter tool to see which times produce the most opens.
8. Test
Finding the best style for your organization often requires continuous testing. What kind of testing is worth doing? Try different headlines, content, and images to learn what works best for your target group.
Focus on A/B testing, which compares the performance of two or more different versions, to see which method of communication resonates best with your recipients.
In our own newsletters, we always test which headline resonates best with our recipients when sending a message.
In addition to A/B testing, you can test emails with different themes to see which ones perform best. Did certain content appeal to the recipients exceptionally well and generate a lot of clicks? If so, you’re on the right track. If an email with a different theme was opened but its content didn’t entice recipients to continue reading, try a different angle on the topic next time and check if the CTA buttons were clear enough.
Only continuous content optimization can improve the success of your emails. Through optimization, you can consistently gather valuable information about what interests your audience and, if necessary, offer new angles on less successful content.
By following your newsletter's clicks, you can see which content performs best.
9. Automate
Do you have to send a lot of repetitive and similarly themed messages? A tip for streamlining email marketing is to use a newsletter tool together with a marketing automation system. This reduces your workload, as automation handles the repeatedly sent messages on your behalf.
By utilizing automation, you not only save time and effort but also can send your customers timely messages based on their stage in the buying journey.
With automation, you can, among other things:
- Welcome a new newsletter subscriber
- Send shopping cart reminders: "Did you forget something? No worries! We added a discount code to your shopping cart."
- Celebrate the customer’s birthday: "Happy birthday! Open the email and redeem your gift."
- Re-engage a passive customer: "We miss you! Come back and redeem your offer."
10. Utilize artificial intelligence
For most of us, content ideation and production are the most time-consuming parts of creating a newsletter. AI can assist with headlines, topic suggestions, and initial drafts, allowing you to save time and diversify your ideation processes.
However, it’s important to evaluate and edit AI outputs to ensure they maintain a human tone and are suitable for your target audience.
11. Track and analyze results
After all this, the only thing left is to follow the results and make changes based on them. Monitor the analytics in your newsletter tool for open rates (OR), click-through rates (CTR), and conversions. Based on this information, you can make adjustments and continuously improve your email marketing.
Continuous monitoring, measurement, and analysis lead to better results and, consequently, a higher return on investment (ROI), allowing you to assess the profitability of your marketing activities. When you know what works and what doesn’t, you can create an even more effective strategy for your email marketing in the future.
Grab at least these email marketing tips
The recipe for a high-quality newsletter and the best tip for email marketing is ultimately simple: continuous development and striving to understand your target audience's needs better and better. To succeed in this, take at least these email marketing tips from this article:
- Offer genuinely valuable content: Even if your emails are visually appealing and all their technical aspects are in order, recipients won’t continue subscribing if the content doesn’t genuinely serve them.
- Maintain your subscriber register regularly: Continuously collect new subscribers from social media and websites. Also, remember to say goodbye to unprofitable subscribers regularly, as they only deteriorate your analytics without producing benefits.
- Measure: Simply put, is there any result without measurement? Only by utilizing measurement can you truly analyze whether your email marketing strategy is effective.
Need a tool for effective email marketing?
Put these email marketing tips into practice with the newsletter tool LianaMailer. Our experts will guide you through using the tool and provide effective additional tips to ensure successful email marketing that suits your company.
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